Vibrations and how they get to your ears.
Noise for airports is a blog about culture, sound, music, and technology.
You can filter the posts to see just things I wrote or made.
Updated (sometimes) by Nick Seaver.
An in-browser, flash-based step sequencer, with multiple voices, drums, and volume/pan controls. Not to mention being embeddable! This is great.
From the Tenement Museum comes this great audio exploration of the former Five Points area in Manhattan. (Actually, it’s a few years old, but new to me!)
You have five points to drag around the map and select from a variety of field recordings, folk songs, spoken word (interviews, sermons, etc.), and some music made specifically for the project. Once you’ve found sounds you like (like “steam through a manhole cover” or “seafood salesman”), you can adjust levels and panning and then save your mix for others to listen to!
Clicking directly on the dots brings up a little info pane so you can find out more about what you’re hearing. This is sort of a complementary project to the Ohio Is a Piano project. Instead of focusing on a data-centric correspondence (88 keys, 88 counties), Folk Music for the Five Points takes a cultural/historical look back. They justify the inclusion of new music by saying that the composer is taking the perspective of a “new immigrant” (although it seems just like a way to make the project more conventionally musical), and their interest is thematic: the daily experience of immigrants in a particular section of New York.
I wouldn’t want to judge one kind of approach superior to the other, but it is certainly interesting to see the different kinds of results that arise from the two approaches.
Raga Explorer is a strange little program that lets you generate your own ragas by picking a type of rhythm, time of day, and clicking around on a spinning mandala/spirograph thing (see pic above). Not sure how the control scheme is supposed to work, and it all sounds a little MIDI-y, but this kind of tool might be a great way to introduce non-standard music to people by allowing them to explore its parameters.
